


The Silence Of An Empty World

by PhoenixAccio



Category: Myst Series, Original Work
Genre: Existentialism, Gen, Horror, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:42:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25100338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhoenixAccio/pseuds/PhoenixAccio
Summary: A man obsessed with learning the secrets of the universe finds something he cannot explain, and it consumes him, figuratively and otherwise.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	The Silence Of An Empty World

**Author's Note:**

> this fanfiction isnt technically myst? it has no real elements definitively setting it in the myst universe, but it was inspired by myst and written to resemble a book one might find in a myst game, so i think that's good enough.

There was once a scholar who studied the nature of the world and all things. He was content in his work, convinced of the importance of that which he sought to learn, and he worked tirelessly to find answers to all of the questions he'd had since he was but a child. Focused as he was on his work, however, the scholar had no real friends or close ones. He sat in his study all day and night, reading great tomes and staring at the stars and the moon through the telescope at his window, and one by one, distanced by never seeing him, all those the scholar once knew drifted away. The scholar had been somewhat saddened by this once, but the longer he worked and studied the more he convinced himself that it was for the better that his distractions removed themselves. The man continued to spend all his days and nights reading great tomes and staring at the stars and the moon through the telescope at his window. It was important work he was doing, after all.

One morning, however, the scholar awoke to find a miniature sphere levitating in the middle of his study. Curious, the man examined the sphere. The tiny orb was a clear greenish-blue in colour with swirls of dull white, and was about the size of a marble. The scholar had never seen anything like this in all of his studies. Fascinated, he investigated further. He measured the sphere, taking notes on its circumference and suspected weight, and recording its other physical characteristics, which he scrawled in a blank journal he kept for just such an occasion. The orb intrigued the scholar. He had once thought he knew nearly all there was to know about the way of the world, but by all he had previously known, this orb should have been an impossibility. The idea frightened him somewhat, but he pushed the feelings away.

Satisfied with his notes, the scholar closed his journal and replaced it on his shelf, lining its leather spine up neatly alongside its brothers'. He ought to put the orb away too, he thought to himself, for safekeeping. Fetching a box from a drawer, the scholar reached out to pluck the marble from where it hung in midair, but was surprised to find he could not. Try as he might, the tiny sphere would not budge. The scholar gave it a sharp tug, then one more, but the ball appeared to be fixed firmly in place, despite the lack of anything it might be fixed to. Well, the scholar thought to himself, if he could not remove the sphere from its place, neither could anyone hoping to steal it away from him. Suddenly feeling very tired, the scholar sighed, replacing the box in its drawer and retiring for the night.

The next morning, the orb was still there. It had not changed overnight, except that the whitish swirls had moved slightly on its surface. Aside from this, the sphere hung defiant and other, unchanging in the centre of his study. The scholar watched the orb for a while, following the pale swirling patterns as they moved across the orb's surface, but when it became clear that they really were the only thing about this perplexing orb planning on making any movement, the scholar frustratedly returned to his tomes and to his telescope to continue his studies as usual.

The next few days, the scholar ignored the sphere. He would walk into his study, and make a show of pretending there was no logic-defying orb floating mid-air over his shoulder as he did his work as he always had. Perhaps, he thought, if he ignored the orb it might go away, or let its guard down and do something new. He felt somewhat stupid for considering the orb might somehow be both sentient and spiteful, but how was he to know, really, that it wasn't? After a few days of ignoring the sphere, the scholar was beginning to allow himself to be convinced that the sphere likely wasn't there at all, simply a figment of his imagination, overworked as he was with his studies. He took two days off, during which he occupied himself by sitting uncomfortably at the small wooden table in his kitchen for an hour or two before accepting that he really had nothing better to do with himself and pulling out one of his large leather-bound philosophy books to read all day instead. It was boring, but it would be worth it to be bored if this worked. When he returned from his self-imposed vacation, however, the orb was still there.

The scholar was frustrated, with himself for having no explanation for this strange phenomenon, with his books for being entirely unhelpful, and with the orb for being so completely unchanging, hanging impossibly in the air mocking both gravity and seemingly the scholar himself. That day, the scholar spent the entire day from when he rose to when he went to bed staring at the orb that had taken up seemingly permanent residence in his study. The next three days were spent similarly, watching the sphere barely blinking, daring it to do something new, until the scholar's gaze wandered to the telescope in the corner of his room. How had he never thought of that before, the scholar berated himself. He could magnify the mysterious sphere, to see if it was any different close-up! Reinvigorated by newfound investigated spirit, the scholar shook himself out of his marble-watching stupor and fetched a set of powerful lenses similar to those a watchmaker might use from a cabinet of similar instruments. He settled the eyeglass on his nose and leaned over the orb, magnifying it gradually to the closest it would get. Then, he focused the lenses, and what he saw nearly knocked him off his feet. The orb was not just some ordinary marble, unusual only in its stubborn refusal to adhere to the laws of physics, it was much more than that. Through his lens, the scholar saw a miniature world. To be specific, he saw his own. He recognized the patterns formed by the winding river his city was built around, and the shape of the small lake in the city centre. He recognized the familiar reddish stone spires of the city's tallest buildings, upper reaches bulging then tapering off like the bud of some enormous flower. Every detail was identical, save for the miniature scale, and the world was fully inhabited, buzzing with life. Removing his eyeglass and setting it on the table beside him, the scholar tore the journal he'd designated for his notes on the sphere off its shelf and frantically began to write.

The more the scholar watched the tiny world, the stronger the need to learn more grew. He watched the sphere every day with his eyeglass now, tomes and telescope abandoned and gathering dust. He needed to know everything there was to know about the miniature world in his study, nothing else really felt like it mattered anymore. Day in and day out, he watched the tiny planet, with its tiny citizens going about their miniature lives. It fascinated the scholar, and he found himself longing to live in this world himself, shrunk down to size to speak to the people on this tiny planet. He needed to know who they were, what they thought about every day. Was their language the same as well? Their way of life? It certainly seemed similar. Every day the scholar studied the orb, and although everything remained more or less the same, the scholar found he did not care anymore, enthralled by the tiny lives playing out before his eyes.

One day, the scholar woke up to the sounds of tiny pops and crackles coming through his study's open door. He hastily scrambled out of bed to find the source of the noise, and found nothing out of the ordinary. To be safe, he decided to check everything to be absolutely certain nothing was wrong. After a quick look, everything in the room seemed fine. The scholar relaxed, before deciding that as he was already up, it wouldn't hurt to check on the orb and its inhabitants. When he had the glass on and focused, however, what he saw made his stomach drop. The usually bustling streets were empty. The lights in all the buildings were off, and the buildings themselves seemed totally devoid of life. Below him on the tiny planet, everything seemed eerily still and silent. There was nobody there, the scholar knew. They were gone. He didn't know why or how they had disappeared, but the man was certain this was what had happened; the tiny people he had spent so long watching had disappeared without a trace.

He watched the empty world for the remainder of the day, chasing the slim hope he'd see someone, anyone, if he just kept watching. He slept fitfully that night, rest broken by irrational worry for the tiny world he'd been watching for so long. The next day and the next he continued to watch, searching for any sign of life. He found himself wishing once again he was down there himself, shrunk down to scale to better search for survivors inside the houses and in other places he could not see as he was now. He thought about this constantly, pictured himself walking through the empty streets as he watched them through his eyeglass day in and day out. His sleep was poor and frequently interrupted, and he found himself watching the planet at night as well. The scholar sat in the chair in his study as he had so many nights before, and he wished with everything in him to be down on the streets of the tiny planet that occupied so much of his thoughts, if not to find survivors than to perhaps learn what had happened. He resented the constant quiet drone of people on the street below his study's window, for all they were absent in the city's twinned miniature, and he kept his curtains drawn so as to prevent his mind from wandering to the people outside, undeserving of their priviledge to live when his planet had not. The scholar drifted off to sleep in his chair as he ruminated, thoughts of his planet still in his mind as his eyes slipped shut.

When he awoke, all was seemigly as he had left it, just as it was every other day. His body ached from the uncomfortable position he'd slept in, but he paid it no mind. As he made his way to the kitchen to fetch something to eat before he returned to his planet-watching, he felt some sense of unease, of something changed that he could not place. It was much like one might feel were all of their furniture moved just slightly in the night, he imagined, or if one awoke to find that all of the walls of their home had become half a shade darker in colour. He frowned, focusing on his surroundings and trying to place the discrepancy, when it finally came to him. The infernal noise from the streets below, that incessant hum of people and machines alike, had disappeared. He had cursed the sound so many times before, but now that it had finally stopped, the scholar was surprised to find how unsettling the sudden silence could be. He was reminded of the day the marble in his study had died, but dismissed the thought, returning to his study to spend another day watching. Before he sat down, however, he allowed his curiosity over the sudden silence to get the best of him. Thinking perhaps he had somehow gone deaf in the night, the scholar separated the curtains, expecting to reveal a bustling street, or at least a couple of loiterers, that he'd somehow lost the ability to hear, but when he looked down, he found the street to be quite empty. This was not normal. In all the time he had lived in this city, the scholar had never seen a completely empty street. Even the most desolate of areas had a rat or two occupying their shadowed corners. Emptiness this absolute was unheard of, and the scholar's apprehension at the silence only grew. He made his way downstairs and pulled open the front door cautiously. There, again, he saw nothing but empty streets. The scholar slipped on a pair of shoes and stepped outside, not bothering to close the door as he investigated the barren landscape. All the buildings were just as he remembered, but there were no people, no strays or pests. Every one of the great machines that kept the city running had come to a dead stop. It was empty, it all was, and it was so, so quiet. One could never know true silence, thought the scholar, outside a situation such as this. No birds sang, no electricity hummed or machines whirred, no people spoke. Even the wind seemed to be holding its breath, not allowing so much as a gentle breeze to rustle a leaf and break the thick, heavy silence that muffled everything like a heavy blanket. The scholar wanted to speak, to break the silence himself, but it was as if he couldn't remember how. He got the distinct feeling that even if he said anything, no sound would come of it. An irrational feeling, certainly, but one he was not altogether desperate to disprove. The scholar walked through the streets, farther and farther from his home. He saw nobody, even when he began looking in windows and trying doors. As far as he could tell, the city was completely abandoned, save for himself. A feeling of dread settled in the scholar's stomach as he made the connection that had been tugging at his mind for so long. He looked up.

The scholar stared up at the sky, clear blue-green with swirling whitish clouds, unable to look away. Miles above him, a colossal eye stared back.


End file.
